Scots: more words for rain than Eskimos for snow

It is often claimed that “Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow”, but I wondered whether this is true or if there were more Scottish words for rain. First, the truth about the Eskimo or Inuit:

David Robson, New Scientist 2896, December 18 2012, Are there really 50 Eskimo words for snow?“Yet Igor Krupnik, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Washington DC believes that Boas was careful to include only words representing meaningful distinctions. Taking the same care with their own work, Krupnik and others have now charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and conclude that there are indeed many more words for snow than in English (SIKU: Knowing Our Ice, 2010). Central Siberian Yupik has 40 such terms, whereas the Inuit dialect spoken in Nunavik, Quebec, has at least 53

So there are up to 50 words. But how many words have we got in Scotland for rain? I’ve compiled the following list many of which I do not know so I’ve marked those I personally use with a *star.

I’ve used as a definition for “rain” any water coming out the sky in droplets that wet surfaces, which includes words such as fog (Scotch mist is really a light rain – often used jokingly – but if not its rain with mist which is often low lying cloud)

Linguistic Note

Scotland has a mixture of words from English, Norse, Gaelic and some from the British empire (torrential?). The main source for the Scots was the Dictionary of the Scots Language and that prompted me to add a lot of other words.

Addendum

A couple of extra words have been suggested:

Smog, Pea-souper
precipitation

But I’ve never heard anyone around here use Smog or Pea-souper. I’ll have to check with an older generation who might remember when there were coal fires.

Stotting – Stot is a common Scots and Geordie verb meaning “bounce” … rain stotting off a pavement.

36 Responses to Scots: more words for rain than Eskimos for snow

One term that came from my Mother’s family is ‘steaming’ which is where (usually in the summer) it rains so hard that the rain bounces up again forming almost a mist about a foot high. Also ‘bobbing down’ where the rain forms big bubbles in the puddles already formed. I don’t know if these had much provenance historically or were like our own family invention ‘pleuting’ which is rain experienced while on a French holiday. I was amused to hear somebody on Radio 4 use the same term and concluded that many Brits with school French arrive at the same word while sheltering from a summer down pour. After all, if it’s used on the BBC it’s practically in the OED.

No doubt about it, if you see a lot of something you invent a lot of words for it.

Thanks, the old Scots were difficult because it wasn’t clear how many might be very local. I missed out a few that were obviously specific I forget the word, but it was something like “A Bannock – like the rain that fell at the Bannock fair”.

I still think there ought to be a specific word for rain that goes more horizontally than vertically. Then there’s the rain that fills gutters.

There ought to be a word for “rain out of a blue sky” – I suppose “blue-sky rain”. Rain that turns to ice when it falls. Rain that you never see fall – but wets the ground. Warm rain. Rain after a humid or dry spell that clears the air.

You missed out smog and pea souper (thick fog) though maybe they were more southern? Also if you want to end up in the MET Office, how about precipitation? Or the ever useful changeable? It looks like it could mean anything but you know they mean rain at some point they can’t pinpoint.

There’s no single word for ice storms and their resultant black ice, probably because they’re not that common.

I considered precipitation when I was near 95 words and thought it would be cheating to add it. Likewise with “heavy”, “moderate”, etc rain – I thought these were measures of rain and not a word for a type of rain. I notice I left in “soft rain”.

One thing that’s struck me is how much the British love words. It’s why English is so big. I cherish the words that my parents included in our childhood. Dad would threaten us with gruts (like grits) and wemmel (nothing) if we didn’t eat our dinner and Mum would talk about snickets and ginnels (small passageways) and say we’d get chingcough if we sat on a cold step. We always assumed it was piles but we later discovered it was an old word for whooping cough. We also invented a few words which can be confusing to strangers.

Stotting, or as it is pronounced, stoattin’ as you say refers to bouncing. Thus stotting a ball off a wall, an age old girls game, with variations as to how th ball was thrown and caught – under leg, after spinning around , after heading it etc. A ball which was an exceptionally good bouncer was known as a stotter – quite rare in days when most balls in use were old punctured tennis balls. From this anything which was exceptionally good, especially a good looking girl was known as a “stoatter”. Very sexist, but I am sure that the girls used the same term of young men.

Thanks, interesting! I’ve checked the Old Scots dictionary and cannot find the term. However, looking at the Oxford dictionary I find it is there and appears in middle English as “misellen” (“to drizzle”). Cognate with Low German musseln ‎(“to mizzle”), Dutch miezelen ‎(“to drizzle, rain gently”). The etymology is “Of obscure origin, but apparently related to Middle Low German mes ‎(“urine”)”.

All too often, this kind of statement means they will look for obscure words in other languages but ignore the potential for just as close words in Old English. But in this case it’s unlikely that it comes directly from Old English because the “linguistic real estate” is already occupied by the word “mis-” as in “mis-take” and another word “maes” which means table.

However, nor does it seem likely to come from “urine” as the phrasing “pissing down” hardly means “fine mist”. As such I suspect a more likely ultimate origin would be from the word: “mist” (found in Old English) .

Old English had a diminutive suffix “-el” (also -ol, -ul) so that “mist-el” would be a small mist
But Middle English has -elen, -len, -lien, from Old English -lian representing repetition or continuousness so “continuous mist”.

Either seem to be a very good etymology, so I am (yet again) surprised it is not mentioned.

And just to add to the mistery (greek), there is the word “mistle” as in “mistletoe” (“toe” means twig). If so, the meaning of “mistle-toe” would be “drizzle twig” which would seem to imply it is old English. But this is interesting as of course one of the few things we know about the druids is that they used to pick mistletoe – which would be kind of ironic, because it appears to me that “druid” comes from a group of words of which today we would write as “dryed” (modern y u in old English) so in old English this would be dru-ed. This in turn appears to be related to the Old English word “drugan” (to dry) from the sense of dried herbs or drugs.

Here in Norn Irn we use mizzle quite a lot, as in, ” It’s only mizzling outside” – as if I would be mizzling anywhere else! I remember that fact about all the Inuit words for snow from a sociolinguistic lecture at uni, but thought they were all nouns rather than verbs? Snow that has partially melted, snow the husky has peed on, etc?

In the North East (Moray but possibly elsewhere) we often describe rain as “weatin’ stuff” or “guie weatin’ stuff”. Translated out of the native Doric “wetting stuff” and “very wetting stuff” respectively. This literally means it gets you wet in a particularly efficient way even for rain!

It is a phrase I’ve always been fascinated by and I can tell you my years of less than scientific research have revealed that it is certainly the case that some types of rain get you wet more thoroughly than others.

Smog and pea souper are nothing to do with rain. And technically, sleet and fog are distinct phenomena (not rain either). It undermines the credibility of the list if you’re going to include related (but different) weather phenomena. Why haven’t you got snow and hail, for eg? Is it because they’re not rain? You’ve got to be consistent in your criteria for inclusion, otherwise it makes a nonsense of it all.

I was brought up in Dumbarton on the north bank of the Clyde we had a saying ‘the Juice is on’ for the rain most people from Partick to Helensburgh new this saying but my wife who’s from Paisley had no knowledge of this saying.

Used in North east meaning it is coming down so incessantly that there are no gaps between the drops, that is whole water. The level after bucketing down (coming down as if someone is throwing buckets of water at you).

Can also confirm hearin mizzle used interchangeably with smirr in both the north and south of Scotland. It’s the mist you get on hills that makes you wet when you walk through it but you cannot actually perceive rain falling as you would in a drizzle.

As a child i loved Sun Showers….a quick shower of rain in a hot sunny day..it left a lovely smell. Mizzle was the kind of rain that hung in the air rather than seem to fall from the sky….my Ma would say..its mizzling outside youll be wet through! An Ulster childhood..